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After a long period of silence I present you the following bash script for downloading books from http://springerlink.com. This is not a way to circumvent their login mechanisms, you will need proper rights to download books. But many students in Germany get free access to those ebooks via their universities. I for example study at the FU Berlin and put the script in my Zedat home folder and start the download process via SSH from home. Afterwards I download the tarball to my home system.

Read on for the script.

Download the script (attached below), push it to your Zedat account, make it executable and run it. You’ll have to give it a link to a book-detail page like this one for example. Also take a look at the example call at the top of the script.

Requires bash, wget, iconv, egrep.

Note: Take a look at the comments, Faro has come up with an updated Bash script which properly handles ebooks which span multiple pages on SpringerLink and merges the pdf-files with pdftk. Thanks Faro!

Note: For those, who’d prefer a Python version over a Bash-version, take a look at my second attempt on a download script. The Bash version is abandoned. Long live the Python version!